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Quickpost: oledump.py plugin_biff.py: Remove Sheet Protection From Spreadsheets

My new version of plugin_biff.py has a new option: –hexrecord.

Here I’ll show how I use this to remove the sheet protection from malicious spreadsheets.

If you want to open a malicious spreadsheet (for example with Excel 4 macros) in a sandbox, to inspect its content with Excel, chances are that it is protected.

I’m not talking about encryption (this is something that can be handled with my tool msoffcrypto-crack.py), but about sheet protection.

Enabling sheet protection can be done in Excel as follows:

Although you have to provide a password, that password is not used to derive an encryption key. An .xls file with sheet protection is not encrypted.

If you use my tool oledump.py together with plugin_biff.py, you can select all BIFF records that have the string “protect” in their name or description (-O protect). This will give you different records that govern sheet protection.

First, let’s take a look at an empty, unprotected (and unencrypted) .xls spreadsheet. With option -O protect I select the appropriate records, and with option -a I get an hex/ascii dump of the record data:

We can see that there are several records, and that their data is all NULL (0x00) bytes.

When we do the same for a spreadsheet with sheet protection, we get a different view:

First of all we have 4 extra records, and their data isn’t zero: the flags are set to 1 (01 00 little-endian) and the Protection Password data is AB94. That is the hash of the password (P@ssw0rd) we typed to create this sheet.

To remove this sheet protection, we just need to set all data to 0x00. This is something that can be done with an hex editor.

First use option -R instead of option -a:

This will give you the complete records (type, length and data) in hexadecimal. Next you can search for each record using this hexadecimal data with an hex editor and set the data bytes to 0x00.

Searching for the first record 120002000100:

Setting the data to 0x00: 0100 -> 0000

Do this for the 4 records, and then save the spreadsheet under a different name (keep the original intact).

Now you can open the spreadsheet, and the sheet protection is gone. You can now unhide hidden sheets for example.

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Quickpost: finger.exe

Windows 10 comes with the finger command, an ancient computer network tool.

You can still use it to lookup weather information, for example 🙂

It establishes a TCP connection to the hostname/IP address after the @ character, using destination port 79. And then it sends the text before the @ characters in ASCII, terminated with carriage return & line feed.

After that, it reads the reply, displays it, and closes the TCP connection.

finger.exe is not proxy-aware.

Port 79 is not hardcoded as an integer in finger.exe: the port is identified by service name “finger” (UNICODE), which is defined in the services list (%SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\services). GetAddrInfo uses this list.

If you replace “finger” with “http\x00\x00” (UNICODE) in finger.exe (via binary patching, a shim, …), the finger command will connect to port 80:

As noted by many, finger.exe can be (ab)used to exchange information and files. Here I had my own go at it with finger.exe & Excel:

 

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Quickpost: Portable Power

I did some tests to generate electricity (230V AC) with a portable 12V battery (well, it’s 10 Kg).

I have a 12V VRLA battery with a capacity of 35,000 mAh. That’s 12V times 35 Ah = 420 Wh. Or equivalent to a 116,667 mAh (420,000 mWh / 3.6 V) USB powerbank.

Charging this 12V battery with a 12V battery charger connected to a 230V power outlet takes almost 7 hours (6:57) and requires 0.49 kWh. That is measured with a plug-in electricity meter with a .00 kWh precision. And I’m working under the assumption that the power requirement of the electricity meter is so small that it can be neglected.

Then I use this fully charged battery to power a 230V 150W halogen lamp via a 12V DC to 230V AC power inverter (modified sine wave).

It runs for 2 hours (2 tests: 2:01 and 2:03) and consumes 0.30 kWh.

Of the 0.49 kWh energy I put into my system, I get 0.30 kWh out of the system. That’s 61%, or a bit better than half of the energy I put into the system.

The main phases where I expect the energy losses are occurring, is in 230V AC to 12V DC conversion and electrical to chemical energy conversion (charging); and chemical to electrical conversion and 12V DC to 230V AC conversion (discharging). I believe the highest energy loss to occur in the power inverter.

And with energy loss, I mean energy that is converted into forms that are not directly useful to me, like heat.

Remark that the halogen lamp test stopped after 2 hours, because the power inverter stopped converting. The battery voltage was 11.5 V then, and I could still draw 1 A at 11.5 V for an hour (I stopped that test after 1 hour).

Next I’m going to try out a 12V to 5V adapter and power some USB devices.